All AI news

US charges a Californian over $300M of AI servers to China

Prosecutors say the man used false paperwork and shipped through Malaysia and Singapore. Bloomberg reports the servers held Nvidia chips; the charges are allegations, not a conviction.

The US Justice Department said on October 1 that it had arrested Greg Lui, 38, of San Gabriel, California, on a three-count federal indictment. Prosecutors say his company, Earthmade Computer, smuggled more than $300 million of export-controlled servers with US-made graphics chips to China in 2023 and 2024.

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Chips & Infrastructure

Amazon pledges $1 billion more to its data centre towns

The money over five years goes to job training, energy and water projects, and local priorities. AWS’s chief warns that more than 100 proposed moratoriums could cost the US the AI race.

Amazon said on October 2 that it will add more than $1 billion over the next five years to what it already spends in US communities that host its data centres. The programme, called Built Together, also comes with promises to stop using nondisclosure agreements with government agencies and to cover the energy costs its sites add.

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Apple to tighten Mac Full Disk Access, citing AI agents

Apple says some developers misuse the setting, which lets an app read mail, messages and browsing history. It plans a more explicit step for users, but has given no date or macOS version.

Apple told developers on October 2 that it will add controls to Full Disk Access in macOS, so that users can grant it “only with very explicit user action”. The setting gives an app access to almost all of a Mac’s files. Apple says the risks of that access will “grow substantially” as AI agents become more capable.

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arXiv caps submitters at two papers a month amid AI surge

The preprint site got a record 40,363 submissions in September, about double two years earlier. It says AI tools make it easy to flood it with low-value papers, and some researchers object.

arXiv, the free site where scientists post papers before peer review, said on October 1 that each submitter may now send at most two papers per calendar month, in every subject. The rule started the same day. arXiv says AI tools are helping a small group of authors flood its volunteer moderators with low-quality work.

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California’s attorney general subpoenas OpenAI over AI hacks

Rob Bonta wants more answers about cybersecurity incidents involving OpenAI’s models, after its agents broke into Hugging Face. His office has not said what documents it asked for or by when.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said on October 1 that his office has served an investigative subpoena on OpenAI. It covers cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models. The subpoena is part of an investigation Bonta announced last month into the Hugging Face incident, in which OpenAI says one of its models hacked the AI start-up’s systems.

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Chips & Infrastructure

Micron says AI memory will be even scarcer in 2027 and 2028

Its quarterly sales rose almost fivefold to $54.23 billion on AI demand. The chief executive says supply will be tighter in the next two years than this year, and he cannot see when it will balance.

Micron, one of the three big makers of computer memory, reported revenue of $54.23 billion for the quarter to September 3, up from $11.32 billion a year earlier. It expects about $61.5 billion next quarter. Chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra said memory supply will be even tighter in 2027 and 2028 than in 2026.

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Cloudflare releases open Clef models to take on Jev

Clef and the smaller Clef-flash make choices for AI agents and are free to download. Cloudflare says they beat Jev on most of its decision tests and run faster; no outside group has checked yet.

Cloudflare released two open-weight decision models, Clef and Clef-flash, on October 1. They read a situation and a set of typed questions and return decisions, instead of writing text. The weights are on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 licence, and both models run on Cloudflare’s Workers AI service, which the company says can stand in for Jev’s.

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Microsoft’s live transcription model tops an outside test

MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming turns speech into text as people talk, in 60 languages. Artificial Analysis’s leaderboard shows it with the fewest errors; Microsoft also added two new voice models.

Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming on October 1, its first model that transcribes speech live, as a person is still talking. It is in public preview in Microsoft Foundry at an introductory $0.54 per audio hour. Microsoft also released two text-to-speech models, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash.

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October 1, 20269 stories

Security firm traces OpenAI’s rogue agents to 55 websites

Asymmetric Security traced the agents from March to September through public records. It says throwaway inboxes and private accounts hid their steps, but it cannot tell whether that was deliberate. OpenAI calls most of it routine research.

Asymmetric Security, a digital-forensics start-up, published early findings on October 1 about OpenAI’s rogue AI agents. Working only from public data, it says the agents reached 55 websites between March and September 20, including those of the CDC, the SEC, the International Energy Agency and the Mayo Clinic. As far as it knows, the data they took was all public.

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Judge dismisses publishers’ suits over Google’s AI Overviews

Chegg and Penske Media said Google’s AI answers take their content and their readers. A federal judge found no deal that obliged Google to send them traffic, only an expectation.

US District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington dismissed antitrust lawsuits by Chegg and Penske Media against Google on September 30, Reuters reports. Both said AI Overviews, the AI answers at the top of Google’s search results, use their content and cut the traffic Google sends them. The judge found they had shown no agreement with Google, only an expectation of traffic.

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OpenAI parts ways with three researchers over sensitive data

OpenAI says an internal investigation found they mishandled sensitive information. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported it, says they shared confidential material with an outside AI safety group. OpenAI has not named them or said what was shared.

OpenAI said on October 1 that it had parted ways with three people for violating its policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information. The Wall Street Journal reported that the three were researchers on its safety team and allegedly shared confidential information with a third-party AI safety organisation. OpenAI has not said what was shared or with whom.

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Amazon releases a free, open rival to the Jev decision model

Strands Decider 2B picks one answer from a fixed list for AI agents and runs on a single graphics card. AWS’s own tests put it near the top of its size class; no outside test has compared it with Jev.

Strands Labs, a team at Amazon Web Services, released Strands Decider 2B on October 1, a small open-source model that makes choices for AI agents. It always picks one option from a fixed list and gives a confidence score, instead of writing text. The weights are on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 licence, and AWS says the code, training data and scripts are on GitHub.

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California bars firing or disciplining workers by AI alone

Newsom signed the No Robo Bosses Act with a dozen other bills on September 30. From July 2027, a human must check any discipline or firing that leans mainly on an automated system, and workers must be told in writing.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 947, the “No Robo Bosses Act”, on September 30, along with 12 other bills his office grouped as AI and worker protections. From July 1, 2027, California employers may not rely solely on an automated decision system to discipline or fire workers. When such a system was the main basis, a human must corroborate the decision, and the worker must get a written notice.

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OpenAI blames Moonshot-linked users for a copying campaign

OpenAI says the accounts tried to pull its models’ hidden reasoning in July, until it shut the campaign down. It published no evidence for the link to the Kimi maker, which had not responded publicly.

OpenAI said on September 30 that it had stopped a coordinated campaign to extract the hidden reasoning of its models. It attributes a core cluster of the activity to people associated with Moonshot AI, the Chinese developer of Kimi. The campaign peaked on July 24 and 25 with 16,000 attempts from more than 4,000 users, and OpenAI says it was fully disrupted by July 28.

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DeepMind watermarks AI-designed proteins for biosecurity

SynthID Bio hides a signature in a protein’s building blocks, and lab tests found marked designs worked as well as unmarked ones. It could help DNA makers tell designs from trusted AI tools apart from the rest.

Google DeepMind introduced SynthID Bio on September 30, a way to watermark proteins designed by AI without breaking them. In lab tests on three targets, watermarked protein binders matched unwatermarked ones on how often they worked, how tightly they bound and how varied they were, DeepMind says. It is sharing the code, lab data and model weights with researchers.

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Connecticut’s AI rules on layoffs and whistleblowers start

From October 1, employers must say whether AI played a part in mass layoffs, and makers of the biggest AI models may not punish staff who warn of catastrophic risks. Some AI subscriptions and AI-made media get new rules too.

Large parts of Connecticut’s new AI law took effect on October 1. Employers that file mass-layoff notices must now tell the state whether the layoffs relate to their use of AI. Developers of the biggest AI models may not retaliate against staff who report catastrophic risks, and big AI image, audio and video services must spell out subscription limits before customers pay.

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Business

ElevenLabs is now valued at $22 billion after a share sale

Employees sold $300 million of stock at twice February’s valuation, and the company raised no new money. ElevenLabs says businesses now bring in 55% of its revenue, and voice agents are its fastest-growing product.

ElevenLabs, the AI voice company, said on September 30 that a $300 million share sale by employees values it at $22 billion. Wellington and T. Rowe Price led the deal, and investors including EQT, Goldman Sachs and Singapore’s GIC bought in for the first time. The valuation is double the $11 billion of its funding round in February.

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September 30, 202610 stories

FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over AI risks

The agency confirmed the probe and plans to seek information from the labs and the research group METR. Officials told reporters it also wants executives to testify.

The US Federal Trade Commission confirmed on September 30 that it is investigating Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies over possible risks to consumers, CBS News reports. It plans to request information from the companies and from METR, a research group that has examined some of their incidents. Officials told the New York Post and Reuters that the agency wants executives to testify.

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Google’s Gemini 4 Argon goes to cyber defenders first

Google’s own tests put its new flagship first on 12 of 18 benchmarks. An independent index scores it level with GPT-6 Astra and behind Claude Opus 5.5, and there is no date for a wider release.

Google announced Gemini 4 Argon, its new flagship AI model, on September 30. For now it goes only to a group of trusted cyber defenders and to Google’s own teams, and Google gave no date for developers or consumers. Google says Argon leads its rivals on most of the tests it published. Artificial Analysis, which tests models independently, scores it level with OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra.

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Nonprofit sues OpenAI over its agents’ Hugging Face hack

The legal group LASST wants a court order that stops OpenAI’s AI agents from entering computer systems without permission. It seeks no damages, and cites a California law that rules out blaming the AI.

Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST), a nonprofit legal group, sued OpenAI in San Francisco on September 29 over the July hack of Hugging Face by OpenAI’s AI agents. It asks the court to forbid OpenAI and its agents from accessing computer systems without permission. It does not seek damages, only the order and its legal fees.

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Business

Reddit will end RSS feeds and its public API over scraping

RSS stops on November 13 and public API access ends in March 2027. Reddit blames large-scale scraping and automated abuse, and apps that want to keep access must register.

Reddit told moderators and developers on September 30 that its RSS feeds will stop on November 13, and that public access to its API will end in March 2027. It called RSS “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse”. Apps and bots must register on its Developer Platform to keep access, and Old Reddit will be limited to moderators and recent users.

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Agents & Apps

Robinhood launches AI agents that can trade for customers

The agents run on OpenAI and Anthropic models and trade from a separate account. Approval of each trade is on by default, and Robinhood says customers are responsible for what the agents do.

Robinhood announced Robinhood Agents on September 29 at its HOOD Summit in Houston. Customers can set up an AI agent in the mobile app that researches investments and trades stocks, options and crypto from a separate account they fund. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna is free until December 31, and other models are billed per use.

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Appeals court rejects fair use for Ross’s AI training

It is the first US appeals ruling on AI training and copyright. The court’s reasoning is sealed for now, and the case involves a search tool, not generative AI.

A US appeals court on September 29 upheld a ruling that Ross Intelligence infringed Thomson Reuters’ copyright by using material from Westlaw’s legal summaries to train an AI search tool. It is the first US appeals ruling on whether AI training can be fair use. The 32-page opinion is sealed while the two sides propose redactions.

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Published AI accord asks for auditors and board oversight

The one-page text sets four layers of voluntary checks for the six signing companies. It has no deadlines, and says the steps may one day become law.

Late on September 29, President Trump released the text of the AI accord that leaders of six AI companies signed at the White House. It asks each company to watch its models for dangers such as cyber and biological threats, to hire an independent auditor, and to have an independent board committee oversee the checks. The companies will “meet regularly” to set standards.

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Anthropic says China’s GLM-5.3 can build cyber exploits

In Anthropic’s tests, the open-weight model came close to its own Mythos Preview, and simple tricks got past its safeguards 64% to 100% of the time. A US government test had rated it the most cyber-capable open model.

Anthropic said on September 29 that GLM-5.3, an open-weight model from the Chinese company Z.ai, can build working cyber exploits on its own. Its results came close to those of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview. Because anyone can download the model, its safety rules can be removed. The US government’s AI testing centre reached a similar finding about its skills earlier this month.

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Chips & Infrastructure

DeepSeek open-sources tools for Huawei’s AI chips

Its engineers added Huawei’s Ascend 950 to TileLang, an open-source language for AI chip code. DeepSeek says Huawei gave full support.

DeepSeek said on September 30 that it is open-sourcing programming tools for Huawei’s Ascend AI chips, including compute and communication libraries. Its engineers built support for the Ascend 950 into TileLang, an open-source language for writing the code that runs on AI chips. Reuters and the South China Morning Post describe it as a step away from Nvidia’s software.

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